Posts by veti

Re: The two questions

That's easy. If it's not both cheap *and* ASAP, it's not right.

Re: toilet roll theft

I've sometimes wondered, how do you even get a JCB for that kind of purpose? Presumably not legit. Do people routinely leave them lying about with the keys in, or what?

Re: Bread

I just spent ten minutes on Teams trying to persuade a colleague to shut the F*** up about whether dogs could transmit COVID-19, and was it safe for dog walkers to let their dogs interact.

I wouldn't mind, but she doesn't even have a frickin' dog.

Yeah, it's not like they told you nine years ago when W7 would end its support life! How dare they spring this - three months ago?

Re: Is this Standard WhatsApp?

I sincerely, nay desperately, hope that the army doesn't convey orders via email either.

Re: Golly, wasn't there something about website -- yeah.

In the "denial of malicious intent", the thing to note is how specific it is.

Think about some of the things it doesn't deny.

Re: don't open unsolicited email attachments

You are fortunate that you don't have to receive such emails as a part of your job.

There are a lot of us who can't afford to just ignore emails, much as we'd like to.

Attachments, on the other hand - yeah, those can die in a fire.

Re: TNOs don’t emit a lot of light

They might emit some light. Depends what chemical or geological - or heck, why not, even biological - processes may be going on with them.

Re: "Bill founded our company with a belief in the democratizing force of software"

GW-Basic, and later QBasic and VBA, are languages that basically anyone can learn to use within the scope of a couple of days self-guided learning on the web. (Or, back in the day when they were invented, a single book, or maybe a two-day training course.) No degree, no background in computer science principles required, no knowledge of things like "the stack" or even "memory".

That's - pretty democratic.

Re: He was an optician

You don't want to isolate yourself too early. Isolation is the hardest part of dealing with the disease. Isolate before you need to, and you're just prolonging that.

Isolation for two weeks is hard. Three weeks is very hard. Four-plus weeks is akin to being in prison, but without the regular feeding. If you put yourself into lockdown now, and in 12 days' time your government announces that everyone has to do it for two weeks, then you'll have condemned yourself to almost four weeks of that.

Re: MS at least try to be the good guys every now and then

TFA mentions Locky and Dridex, both of which used vulnerabilities in MS Word. So it's not just about Windows...

Re: For myself, full-fat VM fibre to my door is still delivering around 100 MB/s.

4 Mb/s is plenty for four simultaneous Skype conversations, unless you insist on high-definition. For regular video calling you can get by with 128 kb/s. If you're prepared to slum it with voice only (remember that?), obviously that's even lower.

Re: Natural vs. artificial intelligence

Scientists absolutely can and have explained how people make choices. The trouble is, people look at the explanation and say "that can't be right, what about my free will?" And so they reject the explanation on, essentially, religious grounds.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that many, if not most, of those people would stridently deny holding any religious convictions at all.

(Other linguistic formulas may be used. Sometimes the word is "agency", or "preference", or whatever. Sometimes it involves redefining "choice" until it becomes something that cannot be made by a machine. But always, the core objection is the same: "I don't want this to be true, so I will move goalposts as necessary to maintain my denial.")

Re: What the ever-loving frack ?

Oh yes, that'll fix everything. Office 2016 was soooo secure.

Re: BLFLDSCT

Ah, but can you pronounce them recognisably?

Re: change the date to (say) 1929

In 1929, the Nazis controlled a less than impressive 2% of the Reichstag. Hitler wasn't being credited with anything much. By 1933, when he actually gained power, it was already clear to most western politicians that he was a nasty piece of work whom it would be wise to hold at, at least, arms' length.

Admittedly there was an influential faction of Nazi sympathisers in British (and American) high society, but to characterise that as the official position or policy of either government is a gross distortion.

And Germany didn't need "dragging" into modernity, it was already a thoroughly modern power. No-one had seriously doubted that since 1870. The whole history of Europe for pretty much the whole of the 20th century can be summed up as "what to do about Germany".

Not true, defending a patent is completely at the owner's discretion.

I'm sure Apple owns some smartwatch patents. So too does Microsoft, and Google, and even IBM. And I wouldn't be surprised if Oppo owns a few of its own. This is not some obscure upstart we're talking about, it's a company that slings upwards of 100 million phones a year. That's three times as many as Motorola.

So your projection is that only 5000 people will die of COVID-19?

Bearing in mind that the total is already over 3800, people are currently dying at the rate of (around, give or take, on average) 100 per day, and the virus is still spreading - what is that projection based on, exactly?

Re: Windows 365 Cloud ?

That's not necessarily O365's fault. Most installations use a third-party spam filtering system, such as Barracuda or SpamAssassin.

Face it, email - as a way to communicate with people you actually want to communicate with - is broken. It's been crushed by the sheer weight of spam. The only email addresses that have a reasonable chance of working are those that are never published, which means they must have been given to you privately.

Re: Fiscal responsibility?

It's called fiscal stimulus. As Keynesian economists have been saying for the best part of 100 years: if you want the economy to do well, try giving out money. Trump has been doing it since he got into office (and the Republican congress and senate suddenly decided the deficit didn't matter any more).

Re: I note one thing

Why do you think the company itself is bragging about it? They got this one right.

Let's hope they haven't missed any others.

Re: But!

In nearly every case on your list, the decision was made by politicians, not by the military.

Sacking a Canadian city (thinking GB was too busy with Napoleon, GB then burnt down gov buildings in Washington)

This was more than 200 years ago. Exactly how long do you hold a grudge?

Dresden

Fire bombing Tokyo

A bombs needlessly on two Japanese cities

All depends what you consider "needless". Did the US "need" to nuke Hiroshima? No, of course not, they could have spent another million American lives (and likely ten times as many Japanese) instead. But someone has to make those judgment calls.

Actual invasion of UK Colony, Granada

Granada is a city in Andalusia. You probably mean Grenada, which gained independence from Britain some ten years before the US invaded (to reverse an internal military coup).

Multiple attacks using drones in Pakistan, who they are not even at war with.

They're not at war with Arizona, either, but federal agents kill people there on quite a regular basis. Frankly I'd rather they attacked with drones than using, say, nerve agents in a perfume bottle, or polonium in tea.

Refusal to extradite USA citizens

From Wikipedia: "From January 2004 to the end of December 2011, seven known US citizens were extradited from the US to the UK.[19]" The "extradition" nonsense is pure bullshit.

Refusal to allow 3rd party trials of US soldiers. Much violation of civilians at Okinawa.

Now this? - this is the only item on your list where I'll concede the point. But even there, I'll point out that some sort of "limited legal immunity" is standard pretty much everywhere soldiers - of any nationality - are stationed abroad. I don't recall British troops in Iraq, for instance, being prosecuted by Iraqi courts all that many times.

No, it's just recognising simple facts. I haven't been to a McDonald's in 20 years, and in all that time I've never missed it one bit.

I have no beef with any other burger chains - including but not limited to Wendy's, Burger King, Burger Fuel - but something about McD's food would always make me feel sick afterwards. Not just the burgers, either - eat anything from their menu and my digestion would revolt.

Don't be ridiculous, why would the Chinese unleash a biological weapon in their own country? It's clearly an American biological weapon.

Re: Those were the days

This software was clearly written in-house, by a full-time employee.

You can still do that today if you want to, and never pay a penny of license fees on that software. Strangely, though, not many companies take that option.

Re: Beware survival bias

That's fine, but are there any instances of modern tech - within the reach of an ordinary middle-class consumer - that are likely to last that long?

Or - scratch "likely", even "capable of" lasting that long?

Re: Freebies

You need to work on your scrounging technique. It's a skill like any other, it can be learnt.

Yeah well, it'll have to get in line.

People have funny ideas about free speech. The awkward truth is that it's always, everywhere, been constrained in many ways - some actively enforced, but most merely assumed and accepted.

The big difference now is that instead of offending random passers-by in the street or a handful of zealots at a public meeting, everything remotely controversial immediately gets broadcast to everyone in the world who is likely to be most upset by it. Because clicks.

Re: No way.

Yeah, that clause right there gives the game away. This "strategy" is about throwing taxpayers' hard-earned wonga to the politicians' friends and backers in industry.

I swear, since the UK withdrew from EU decision making (the day after the referendum), the whole thing has gone to buggery. Every new "initiative" I see from them is somehow dumber than the last.

Re: Judgement

I reluctantly agree that the plaintiffs do make a good point.

Even more reluctantly, I would have to conclude that a judge doesn't have the authority to edit the statute to that extent. Either the law is (whatever the relevant test is), or it isn't. If it isn't, then the judge's only remedy is to declare it unenforceable, and basically send it back to the legislature to fix. The judge can't unilaterally rewrite it.

Re: Trump leads where others follow

Johnson is smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is.

Trump is way smarter than his enemies think (which is faint praise, but still). It suits him to let them think he's dumb, and that's why he's president today. But if he seems dumb to you, that's just because you haven't worked out what he's doing yet.

(Hint: a big part of it is "riling up his base" and, just as importantly, "riling up the Democratic base". Because the more riled they get, the more bitter the primary battle will be, and the weaker the candidate that will emerge from it. Trump's dream is of a Democratic nominee whom barely half of their own party will vote for, and he's well on the way to achieving that now.)

Re: King Trump

Johnson's next move will be to remove the Fixed-term Parliaments Act so that politicians can force elections when their popularity peaks

Or to put it another way, restore the condition the UK somehow managed to live with until 2011. That doesn't sound so bad to me, particularly since the FTP Act gave rise to that farce back in October.